The Elysium Childhood Institute
by We'reAllABitOdd
Summary: Demigods do not exist, but mutations do. Not that anyone knows that - not until it's too late and they find themselves confined to a life hidden away, where not even they know what is happening. Welcome to the Elysium Childhood Institute! AU
1. This is no Heaven

There was always a constant, steady beep that filled the air - not that anyone of them knew where it came from - and the occasional protest from a newcomer who had been kept in the dark or an old timer who was aware that day was most likely their last so they were free to take liberties.

It was a newcomer this time around, a pretty girl whose beauty was marred by the prominent tear tracks that trailed her face, the quivering of her bleeding lips and the flitting of her cloudy, grey eyes. No one raised an eyebrow, no one turned a head - this was their normal and she simply did not understand it. They all sat there, staring straight ahead, focused on nothing, dressed in monochrome and tagged around the wrist with a coloured wristband.

They were branded too, on the inner forearm with a number. She didn't remember receiving the brand, the band or the attire but she had awoken in a stark white room she had never seen before to be greeted by them all.

She was numb as well, aware of what was happening but unable to physically feel the grasping hands of the wardens around her biceps, to feel their blunt nails slowly piercing the tanned skin, dotted with freckles like they were constellations.

She screamed and cried and protested until her voice was hoarse, her mouth dry, her breath gone, her throat doing some protesting of its own. Still, not a single kid, for none were older than seventeen, bat an eyelid.

She was forced into submission only by the limits of her own body and the realisation of the futility of the pain she was putting herself into. She had gone limp, dangling like a rag doll from the arms of men thrice her size, by the time they threw her roughly down onto a stool of her own, made of dull, worn, hard plastic like all the others.

There were ten of these stools to a table including her own, all but one occupied by a kid, all older than her.

Instantly, she shrunk into herself as she felt an array of intense eyes piercing her from silent faces: the fiery gaze of the mountainous boy beside her; the deadly but enchanting pools of gold of the petite girl beside him; the electric blue that was present on two unsmiling; stern faces; the kaleidoscopic heterochromia of the gorgeous girl next to the blue-eyed boy; the burning yet not fear-inducing wide-eyed stare of the scrawny boy whose fingers drummed on the tabletop; the gentle blue of eyes that did not intimidate, only analysed; the wide pits of pure darkness beside him that pulled her in, like the abyss, the longer she stared into it, was staring back at her.

At last, the wardens left with an unnecessary slam of the door and the room seemed to breathe again. The figures became more human and less like statues as they leant forwards in curiosity as they were freed, their gazes not relenting but their focus drifting slightly.

She looked at them properly for the first time. They were all pallid and ill-looking, slim but not too skinny even though she could blatantly hear the rumbling of empty stomachs - even they seemed to have hushed in the presence of the wardens! Dark circles, like heavy bruising, fell beneath eyes that, the longer she looked at them, became sadder and sadder, heavier and heavier.

They all had their elbows placed on the table arms, scarred with the brand, burn marks, numerous injection sites and various other markings she'd rather not consider, were all tagged with the same colour as her own: orange. All of the colours were bright, she supposed it made them easier to spot and distinguish.

She kept her eyes trained on the empty chair to her right.

At least until one of them spoke. The voice belonged to a girl, clearly, though it held little femininity, only a dry, raspy quality that sounded rough to her unaccustomed ears.

"Welcome to Hell." Shredded lips spread, crimson seeping gently from some of the cracks. It was clear, however, the girl was not joking.

Another thing one could tell from simply observing these kids was, despite being teenagers, their appearances had entirely dropped from their minds. The girl who spoke, for instance. Her hair looked to have once been short but had since grown out unevenly, the odd neon streaks of blue, similar to her eye colour, that made appearances not beginning until about halfway down their respective strands. She looked to be one of the older ones in the room, seventeen at most.

Her chipped nails found their way to the band that was tied tight around her wrist. "I'm Thalia." She dropped the band and let her chin fall to rest in her hands. Her arms were so smothered in freckles, the pale skin, nearing translucency, could scarce be seen through them.

She waited for a moment in silence, not one of the nine braved breaking. "You know," She was picking at the band again "It'd be polite for you to respond?"

"Oh!" The new girl exclaimed, feeling sick to her stomach, terrified and disoriented. "Annabeth!"

"Well, Annabeth, what'd they get you for?" This time it was a male voice, hoarse but still soft and gentle - she supposed it matched his eyes.

Her stomach tied itself into a tight, uncomfortable knot as her mouth went dry "What?" She squeaked, she had no clue why she was there - why any of them were - was he insinuating she had done something wrong?

"Will," the dark eyed boy next to him complained "Perhaps you'd like to explain something before asking that?"

The boy - now identified as Will - sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck, fingers getting tangled in his matted sandy hair. He chuckled a little, uneasy. "Right…" He paused for a second, sending a glance to the dark eyed boy that was staring at him still, waiting for him to do something wrong "Well," he began again, pulling at his own orange band "You don't know what this place is, right?" Annabeth shook her head slowly "They've not changed that then!" He sounded angry "Bet you don't know a thing about us either?"

"Will, you're frightening her. She doesn't know who we are, how's she going to know anything about us?" The girl with the golden eyes said as she reached over to gently hit his arm "And Nico," The dark eyed boy turned to her sharply "Stop staring at him like that, you're making us all uneasy."

Nico let out a breath that whistled as it passed his lips "I'm the older sibling," he insisted "I'm meant to boss you around, not the other way around!"

"Debatable." Hazel muttered, Annabeth had no idea what she meant by that.

That was a surprise to Annabeth - the only similarity she could find was the lack of height. He was as pale as anything, everyone there seemed to have been drained of healthy colour, but her skin was dark and warm, the only inviting thing Annabeth had seen thus far. His eyes were dark and uninviting yet she was oddly drawn to look at them. The girl's, on the other hand, were as warm as the rest of her, Annabeth felt like she could stare into them for hours without drowning, she would just float in the pool of molten gold.

"Sorry Hazel." Will apologised after a moment, turning his attention back to Annabeth "So, you don't know anything?"

For the first time, she spoke an entire sentence "I know so little I don't even know what I don't know."

"It was the same for all of us," A gentle, charming voice assured her as she was met with kaleidoscopic eyes. "I'm Piper." she smiled, her pretty face lighting up like a beacon in a place as dreary as that.

Will began again "Would you like to hear about what you don't know or why you don't know it first?"

"What I don't know."

"Right, Frank?"

The large boy by Hazel's side coughed into his fist before turning to her and showing off a baby face, covered in a large smile. She just didn't understand it - how were these kids who were so obviously messed up and messed around with so normal, calm and kind?

"We're, well I suppose the most gentle word is special." he almost snorted as he said that, as though the prospect of calling them special was entirely ridiculous "To put it simply, we can do things we shouldn't be able to. I don't mean mediocre things," he clarified "Like popping your joints out of place at will or whatever, I mean things they think make us dangerous.

We can't show you much," he sounded apologetic "They've got eyes on us each passing second, if they think we're doing something with our oddities they'll have us quarantined" His eyes flitted from the space behind her to Hazel "No one here has ever been quarantined." That statement applied to the entire giant room of kids "It's just a rumour but, apparently, only one person has ever been quarantined - the youngest kid ever here, one of the first as well. That was, what, eight years ago?" He looked to the tall boy next to Thalia, the one with the same eyes, for confirmation. He nodded.

"No one here has ever seen him, all of those Originals have long gone - we don't actually know what they do with them but, once you turn twenty, you disappear. There are a few theories, the most popular among them including the idea they move you to another site or they no longer have any use for you, that you are no longer any good to them and their experiments and they'd rather get rid of threats young.

But they say he's still here."

"But why are we dangerous?" She almost cried.

"We can do things they can't. Me for example, I am type X39YT." He flashed her a glimpse of his band. The code was printed there in large, easy-to-read letters. "It means I'm stronger than most."

Hazel picked up where he left off "I'm type A12PH. I can control things underground or found there."

"But what do those codes mean?" Annabeth butted in before the next person could continue.

"The letters describe the type of oddity," The blonde boy Frank had checked with earlier told her "The numbers are a further classification of strength and subdivision. That said, we aren't experts on it - we haven't yet figured out the numbers exact meaning. You see, Frank's X39YT, we know his oddity and that, while categorised by the same letter code, it is different from Clarisse's," He gestured to a large, snarling girl sat across the hall "She is X45YT. But we don't know quite how different they are."

She nodded her understanding as the boy whose fingers had been playing an erratic beat on the table that nearly matched her heart rate spoke. "And I'm A26BF." He almost sounded proud of it. "I'm good with fire - from what we figure, 'A' codes are rare, too." he scrunched his eyebrows for a split second, looking as though he were mulling over something he had forgotten "Oh! I'm Leo by the way." he told her as he remembered.

Thalia came next "A18GE. Newby, you got yourself paired with the Oranges - they say we're the most dangerous, we've got the most As too."

Then was the boy next to her, the one Annabeth was just going to assume was her brother, who took the liberty of introducing himself before he told her. "Jason," He said curtly "A15GE."

Thalia flung an arm around his shoulder, making him look as though he'd rather not be there "We're oddities among Oddities." She explained "Very rarely do you get siblings who are both Oddities, much less ones who share the same letter code. Like hazel and Nico - they're siblings who are both Oddities but hazel is APH, Nico is ADG - A61DG, by the way."

Jason weaselled his way out from under her arm as she made a childish face towards him.

"I'm B65FS - as far as we're aware, anything that's not an 'A' has no significant meaning in rarity or anything, just in case you thought a B code was impressive." Piper said.

"It's not common though," Jason told Annabeth as Piper kicked him in the shin "The only other BFS we have here is that girl over there," he pointed to a girl's back a few tables away "Drew - B76FS."

"E34GD" Will said simply.

"But what does that all mean - Frank is strong, Hazel has her control, Leo has his fire, how about the rest of you?" Annabeth dared ask.

"Thalia and I can control certain aspects of storms," Jason informed her "While we are both capable of using each, I have shown a strong preference towards air over my sister's preference: lightning."

"I am…" Piper began before pausing and looking up as though searching for suitable phrasing "Convincing." She, at last, settled on a word. "I can make people do things, anything." She didn't sound very happy about it. Annabeth couldn't imagine she was - she didn't understand how Leo was so upbeat about being one of these Oddities when it had landed him in a place like that.

"Nico's a necromancer," Will said "I'm a healer."

"There you go again," Hazel snickered "Making this seem like some kind of fantasy novel."

"And me?" Annabeth croaked as she lifted her arm to her face and examined the bold lettering "Z45QT?"

"ZQT?" Piper asked "That'd be an abnormally enhanced mental ability, right?" Jason nodded "There are a few like you." She reassured Annabeth before turning to Jason "Are there anymore 45s?"

"One." he said "Or at least as far as I know. Malcom." he lightly poked the boy sitting on the table behind him, making him yelp in surprise before turning.

"Jason, what was that for?"

"We've got another Z45QT."

"Oh, really? That's cool. She's tiny though - how old is she?"

"Don't know." piper told him "Ask her yourself; her name is Annabeth"

"Hi Annabeth." She waved back nervously "How old are you?" Piper and Leo both snickered at how strange he sounded speaking in such a way.

"Twelve."

Every face grew a little darker - after the rumoured Quarantine kid the youngest ever admitted, the youngest that had ever been allowed, was fifteen: Hazel's age. No one said a thing.

"Why did I not know any of this?" Annabeth asked at last, she was having trouble believing any of what she said and was still incredibly uneasy.

"Oh that." Thalia said "Frank mentioned that they think we may be dangerous, right? Well… he can tell you the rest then."

"You're so helpful." Jason told her as Frank sighed.

"Well," The baby-faced teenager began "I'm not entirely sure - everything we know is down to what the ZQTs can figure out - but we think it's because they fear resistance. We are more powerful than them by default. If they leave us be or allow people to know about us they're afraid we will be assets in a rebellion against them."

"Them?"

"The government. Say, did you see the name of this place when you came in?" She shook her head, her curls, damp with sweat, bounced over her shoulders. "Huh, they've got more violent as well then? Hazel's been here for about six months, I've been here about a year, yet everything you've told me is worse than what she did. Anyway, it is 'The Elysium childhood institute'. You know what Elysium is?"

"It's from mythology, right? I suppose you could call it the equivalent of heaven."

Frank made a noise of agreement before he shook his head "This place isn't like heaven at all. Then again, it's not much of what it says at all - someone a while ago claimed to have heard about this place before they came here - it advertises itself as a hospital for physically and mentally ill children who are either dangerous to themselves and or others or whose parents just cannot cope with the extra care needed at the time, apparently. It's meant to be a temporary thing; it never is."

"And the brands?"she carefully ghosted a finger over her own, the skin uneven, surrounded in red, irritated and tender to the touch. She grit her teeth and recoiled.

Jason looked at her "They're us." He said simply "Instead of names, they give us numbers - easier to remember and it makes us easier to keep track of. I'm not Jason Grace anymore," he mumbled the last part "I'm 364."

"Why don't our parents say anything?" A chill ran down her spine as she anticipated the answer she was convinced she would not like.

"They can't. There's another rumour about the Quarantine Kid - his mother refused to keep her mouth shut, she cried and screamed and yelled and threatened to tell when he was taken. She wouldn't let go. They killed the poor woman - they killed her for not letting a group of violent officials drag her child away from her, never to be seen again." frank said, shivering "You know what makes it even worse? The Quarantine kid? He was four at the time. Worse still? She was killed as this kid - this toddler - was held in her arms, crying and not knowing what was going on as he was carted away by these officials carrying the same guns they had shot through his mother with."

"His mother?" She asked quietly "Was she his only parent?"

"So the story says."

"But why would they do that - go straight to lethal weaponry when there were so many alternatives?"

"I don't know - sadism, or their twisted, prejudiced views that make us subhuman and demonised?"

"But where did this even come from?"

He didn't respond anymore, just shook his head before placing it on his arms, crossed together over the table.

Hazel looked at him "You know you can't sleep - they'll kill you if you mess up their experiments."

"What?" Annabeth asked her.

"They're doing experiments," she said, her voice lowering in a way Annabeth could not possibly perceive as characteristic of her "all the time." she ran a hand through her thick, curly cinnamon hair, not bothering to push it back when it fell forwards to cover half her face "Everything we do is part of their experiment - the way we act, the things we tell you, the things we do every single boring day." She sighed "If he is real and still alive, I feel sorry for the Quarantine kid. Six months here and I'm not sure I'll last another - eight years here in high security, no contact with any kids his own age, never knowing any different. We don't know all that much, but we do know this place is wrong."

Leo and Malcolm were talking, Malcolm contributing more sighs than words to the communication. Annabeth couldn't hear them. It felt like there was blood rushing through her ears like a river. She couldn't hear anything.

Something had struck her - this was real and she was living in a kind of Hell. And her Hell was nothing compared to his. She had an odd feeling in her stomach, she couldn't help but think he was real; she wasn't sure why, but she knew.


	2. Orange Means Danger

Annabeth followed the crowd of kids, walking in a slow, uniform line through sterile white hallways that intertwined and intersected in such a way she wasn't sure how the wardens leading them knew where they were going. The ground beneath their feet untainted by the clean, soft soles of their issued white plimsolls that had never seen the ground outside the cleanliness of the confines of the institute.

Annabeth had found her hand to be ghosting the edge of Thalia's, the older girl unaware of Annabeth's much tanner fingers hovering beside her own. The oranges walked together, shuffling beside each other without touching - _there was to be no contact in the halls unless one of the participants was a casualty of some degree, if they had collapsed, for instance_. That was a rule Annabeth had seen printed on the notice plastered on the walls, black paper with white writing, just as bland as everything else.

None of the others in her group was willing to admit it, but they had all been that casualty. You could not go a month in that group without collapsing. There was a secret with the orange group.

Orange meant high risk.

High risk meant extreme exposure to experiments involving dangerous substances.

They only assigned you Orange if they came to the conclusion you had the potential to be a danger.

How strange, then, that a simple ZQT would be put into the group of theirs - the group in which no one had ever reached the age of twenty at which people usually disappeared; the eldest had disappeared in the same way at eighteen, unprepared and with no farewells given.

The Oranges were the last to be let into one of the doors, industrial grey to contrast the seemingly endless expanse of white that was beginning to affect Annabeth's vision, lined with a series of locks. Theirs had the most of any, the metal of the door was thicker too, the whole place fireproof and soundproof, the ground beneath the floorboards just as thick as the door.

Annabeth, upon waking through the door, felt her heart drop back down to her feet. The room was lined with bunk beds, five of them.

All of them aside from herself went straight to their beds, sitting on the thin mattresses, backs leaned up against pillows of the same nature, the metal of the bedframes cold on their skin. A few eyes landed sadly on the bed above Thalia's, on the white sheets, clean and slightly crinkled just as all the others were.

Not understanding why, Annabeth made sure to steer clear of even approaching that bed, walking directly over to the one beneath Piper's. The sheets were almost as cold as the metal.

Her eyes never left that empty bed, not as she spoke to those who had been assigned the role of her 'friends'.

"Where are you from?" Piper asked kindly.

Annabeth wished she could see the older girl's kind face as she spoke, but responded nevertheless "San Francisco. Where are we?"

"Long Island South," Frank said from across the room, voice echoing in the near silence, hitting the barren walls with perhaps too much clarity "Or so the kid who claimed to know about this place told us."

Annabeth shivered uneasily "How did I get here?" her stormy eyes glazed over as they ran over the still angry flesh around the brand she almost wished hurt more.

"We don't know," Thalia cut in bluntly "You just wake up here, dressed strangely, that brand on your arm and that band on your wrist. You wake up here, doomed ad never given any chance to get away."

Annabeth's heart jumped up, lodging itself in the base of her throat. She swallowed but could not dislodge it.

"There must be a way," She brought the thin sheets up, pressing them against her lips as she whispered, her words futile.

No one heard, or at least no one acknowledged her. Nico looked up at the lock suspended on the far wall. He clicked his tongue.

"Later than usual." he pulled himself to his feet and made his way across the room, flicking little switch on the wall. The overwhelming brightness of the greatly artificial lights abruptly dimmed to darkness.

"What's later than usual?"

"The night warden, he must have been held up at another room - I don't really want to think of why."

Sure enough, as the world between Annabeth's gradually narrowing eyelids began to blur, spin, and desaturate, the door was pulled open with little consideration.

She was startled back to a state of complete consciousness as the eyes that almost appeared red in the light scanned them, small in the large, scowling face they belonged to, but piercing, as though they were a blade driven through her chest.

Her breath hitched and she began to shiver, not stopping after he left, but, eventually, her basic needs won out and she, after what was definitely the worst day of her life thus far, fell asleep.

Two pairs of bright blue eyes, identical in colour, scanned the room as the keen ears of a nervous mountain of a boy twitched at the soft noise of her gentle snoring.

He nodded unsurely, only once, a sharp movement that, despite the sheepish look on his face, told them everything they needed to know.

A jolt ran through the door beneath two hands and the electric locks clicked. The door noiselessly fell open, slowly, but no one dared push it - it always stopped right before the hinge creaked. Hazel was the first out, the group backed by Thalia who was just a bit late out, like she had been waiting for someone before realising they weren't there, that everyone was gone already.

Their soft plimsolls, designed not to damage the floors no one would see anyway, no matter how carelessly or deliberately they trod, were also silent as they crept over the floors, cold even through the thin soles. They knew their timetables, _he_ had figured it out, called it the secret of the Oranges. He was the reason they knew this guard was not as serious as the others, that the warden assigned the night shift on every ninth day, for he had forgotten the dates by the time he had realised, actually slept on the shift, only caring about the money his supposed reliability bagged him. He didn't care enough to help them, he didn't care at all, it just happened to work to their advantage.

That helped them out, but then there was _their_ spot. It was nothing more than an alcove in a wall, hidden behind a few loose boards that formed a gap Frank could hardly squeeze himself through, but the alcove itself was much larger; it almost seemed bigger than the whole institute, perhaps because they were unmonitored as they sat there.

They could only hope _she_ wouldn't wake up while they were gone.

They couldn't let her know, not yet - no one as young as her - Hell, as young as them - ever deserved to know such a thing, a thing so horrendous it was scarring.

In that alcove, in that little spot of freedom for only them, the beeps were louder, much louder, there was a light shining through the crack, and, every now and then, distantly, you could hear one of two things: hysterical screaming or maniacal laughter.

Of course, they all knew just what it was.

And they were getting tired of ignoring it, now that _he_ was gone, now that _he_ couldn't hold them back. How could they drag her into that?

How could they bring her into their less than ideal affairs before she'd even had the first injection, before her arm was pocked like the craters on the moon with injections sites, some still red and sore, others pale, white or pink, and somewhat glossy - scar tissue, lots in small increments, they had long ago forgotten entirely.

She pulled back the panels, Frank scratched at his upper arm, knocking a scab and not noticing, not as the pain dully registered with his far-too-accustomed brain, not as the blood seeped gently into the rolled-up sleeve of his off-white t-shirt, still too big for him even if he was one of the largest there and all the boys were issued shirts of the same size.

He pulled back the second as well as he knelt beside the opening and began to crawl, stomach to the pristine floor, back grazing the top, mildly painfully, elbows coming into too close of a proximity with the sides for him to feel entirely at ease with the less-than-pleasant trip. He never had.

Jason was last this time, calloused hands gripping at the rough backs of the panels as he replaced them, rubbing his hands rawer. His blunt nails caught on the side as he shimmied in backwards.

But something was different that night.

Behind the beeping, the painful, high sound, there was neither a scream nor cackle. There was, instead, a series of incoherent mumbles that, while forming no actual words, conveyed a message to all those present.

 _Time was running out. Something was going to happen._

Even if they didn't know what…

When Annabeth woke up, the room felt more stifling than it had before, it felt strange. But she couldn't place it, couldn't put her thumb on it as she looked around and saw faces as bleary as her own, blinking away sleep as their ears took in the wails of the siren, _alarm,_ she reminded herself as she pressed her palms tightly against the side of her head, trying to block it out.

Her efforts were fruitless. Her hair, a matted knot of curls that seemed to have tied themselves together in her fitful sleep, fell over her eyes as she slipped the plimsolls on her feet, yawning as she shuffled after her group.

They were back in the room where she had first been sent. There were trays on the tables, labelled with little tags, no names, only numbers, corresponding with the numbers on their arms.

She sat down and looked at the meal before her, remarkably bland in appearance, all number of colours between pale, murky brown, grey, and white.

But then she felt her stomach rumble, not that she could hear it over the noise of the hall, the chatter amongst groups, the yawns from which no one was safe, the clattering of cutlery, the squeaks of the paper plates and cups on the plastic trays.

She didn't register the taste as she swallowed down the surely bland meal, meant to provide only nutrients rather than enjoyment as she so distinctly remembered mealtimes being for with her family.

She did have to wonder: Would Helen miss her?

That day had been different from the last, they had been taken to a series of rooms, the doors dissimilar from the ones on their sleeping quarters but the atmosphere certainly not. There was a coloured band on every door, a number, from one to four beneath it.

As they bustled through the door labelled with an orange band and the number four, after being pushed roughly by the warden who did nothing but snarl at them, Annabeth furrowed her brow as she brushed her hands firmly over her upper arms.

"What are the numbers?" She asked Will.

The boy looked at her with his head tilted "They're the wings - one through four, sorted in order of importance to the establishment, one being the lowest priority, four being the highest."

"We're four," she observed plainly, pausing for a moment before cocking one eyebrow so it sat above the other "Why?"

"We're dangerous." Nico deadpanned seriously, his hand having unclasped from Will's to rest uneasily in the pockets of his baggy tracksuit bottoms, short, skinny body swallowed up by the large excess of fabric of the clothes made for boys more Frank's size than his.

"I'm nothing more than smart…" She trailed off but the intention was there - they were dangerous, with their A's and B's and oddities that exceeded her understanding of human capabilities, even if she was not.

"We don't know how they work," Leo whispered to her, leaning behind Hazel to speak after having lined up in height order, the line beginning with Annabeth, followed by Hazel, Leo, Nico, Thalia, Piper, Will, Jason and, finally Frank "They're crazy." he said the word with odd inflection, causing Annabeth to need to suppress the urge to snort in poorly disguised humour as the door opened once again.

A series of spines were straightened abruptly, all mouths snapped shut suddenly, breaths drawn in deeply and hands snapped to positions tightly behind their backs, like a row of soldiers at attention. The voice of a woman, stern and cold, unkind and icy, called them all by number in a voice that held no hint of emotion.

No one reacted to their number, and, despite the fact that she could see them, she nodded subtly with each calmly recited number and made a mark in the black ink of a fountain pen on the open pristine, leather bound notebook that sat open on her lap. Then she sat down on a chair, made of the metal anything that wasn't white in the institution was made of, a cushion of the colour in question in place within the frame.

Her eyes, dark and unwelcoming, stared right into Annabeth's.

"I am Hera," She told her, legs crossed, one over the other, as she folded her hands together over her knees, clothed in black that was a welcome difference from the sempiternal stretch of white, even if it came in the form of a woman whose eyes could pierce just as much as he needles lined up along her desk.

"You must trust me, I will not hurt you." her face was schooled in such a manner it seemed almost definitely sincere, but her words were far from, her tone making the vicious brand on Annabeth's arm prickle with a sort of pain she could hardly stand.

Annabeth's suspicions she had considered fact since they had formed were proved correct as she asked the first of them, Frank, to come forwards and take a seat on the crinkled plastic that covered most of the desk, the only part not covered being that on which the needles were lined.

He sat, legs folded together as the woman looked at him sternly, eyes scanning the needles, selecting one, though for what reason Annabeth didn't know. She flinched back as the needle disappeared beneath his skin, sickly in colour, on the inside of his arm, between two others, directly central. Frank didn't react and neither did anyone else.

She watched in sickened fascination as the liquid in the needle disappeared beneath the boy's skin. Frank moved back to the line, assuming his original position mechanically, sleeve rolled up above the skin where the needle had found itself a temporary residence, a bead of blood, small like a bright, little ruby one might just find in an earring.

Without a word, Jason stepped up to take his place. One after another, the others did the same.

Annabeth's knees shook as she waited, her hands knotting together anxiously even though they didn't stray from their place behind her back. Neither her heart nor mind would cease in their racing.

Hazel returned and Annabeth was forced to trust those quaking legs to carry her to that table.

Once they had, she could feel the table beneath the thin sheet of plastic and her issued trousers, feeling almost hyperborean. She shivered as she sat and looked away as the needle was pressed to her arm. She caught the looks of sympathy she was being sent and took it with a grain of salt, as the plunger was pushed and she felt the substance, of which she knew nothing, pool within her being.

Her eyes stung, she blinked, once twice, and once more. But she outright refused to let that teardrop fall. She refused to feel the warm trail of the salty liquid as it travelled down her cheek.

It was over but, even as they stood there with matching ruby earrings on their arms, none knowing the slightest thing about the new substance introduced to their blood, they were not given permission to exit the room. Hera left after a minute, taking the now empty needles with her on a tray.

She returned with the same tray, loaded with scalpels and another set of needles, the liquid in them not clear this time around, rather a brilliant shade of sea green Annabeth would have otherwise loved, had it not been for the small detail it would be inserted into her bloodstream.

Again, no one else was fazed, at least not that they showed, having grown used to such treatment. But, even though the needle itself had caused no pain, a moment after she returned to the line, her head spun and she felt her vision turn into a series of indistinct blobs rather than the definite forms and lines she had never once been unable to see before her arrival to Elysium.

They were allowed out soon after, sent back to their sleeping areas rather than to the lunch room.

It was a good idea, not one of them could see straight, even if they hid it well. Annabeth's skin crawled and she was desperate for it to stop. She clawed at the skin as though that would accomplish something, as though she could dig the spiders that were crawling below however many layers skin. She ripped at her flesh, pulling away skin as she tried to do with the eight legged beasts she swore she could see. She wanted to evulse the little arachnids so much she picked the injection sites that were just beginning to heal, drawing a stream of blood, a ruby river which their little ruby earrings could not even begin to rival.

But they were all asleep, snoring with their faces buried in pillows and legs tangled up in thin sheets. They didn't see that little part of the room that had never belonged to anyone become saturated, a bright red that strayed from the white of their lives more than any of their irises or hair, more than the coal colour of Hera's suit.

So Annabeth cried to herself, her tears soaking into the pillow as her blood did the sheets, her wails pitiful but so near to silent no one woke up. And no one cared, not the security warden who watched the little girl tear herself apart as the serums mixing with her blood messed with her brain, pulling at sections and warping every thought within, warping everything she felt.

She woke up to the dinner bell, scarlet and sticky, unsure as to why she had awakened in sheets dyed crimson.


	3. Are You Dreaming?

Annabeth's head swam constantly, dots dancing in front of her vision as she felt her brain pulse and pound on her skull. Some days, the dizzying spinning and warping would send her to sleep as soon as she dared let it, others it would keep her awake, make the lights on her closed eyelids dance around, contort into horrifying images. Sometimes it was the spiders, all covered in blood. Other times it was faces, most of them ghostly white aside from the blood smeared around the features, attached to bodies that were barely there, drowning in black fabric that barely touched their exposed bones. The thin skin was stretched across sharp bones that looked as though they would pierce through it if the faces were to move.

But they never did move, their chapped, pale lips stretched and cut as though screaming, their gaunt cheeks sunken in, their eyes bulging from their face, bloodshot. But they didn't move.

The worst thing about these faces? They were all so familiar. Or, at least, all but two of them.

Annabeth stayed awake some days, the others stayed awake some days.

It was pretty much guaranteed that, eventually, those days would overlap.

Annabeth was lying with her head on her cold pillow, her damp hair pooling around her as she allowed her eyes to drift closed tiredly. She thought she might actually be able to fall asleep then, but then she heard the rustling and bumping. However, she was willing to ignore it, to succumb to the darkness that was beginning to cover the bloody, writhing mass of spiders printed on her eyelids.

Then she heard the voices, familiar and hushed, and she just couldn't ignore it anymore. She pushed herself laboriously onto shaking elbows, breath quivering as she managed to pull herself from the tangle of the sheets.

"What are you doing?" She blearily asked Thalia as the girl made to follow the rest of them out. She started and paused, foot halfway to the floor. Her mouth dropped and eyes opened.

"What?"

"What are you doing?" Annabeth shakily managed to stand and slip on her plimsolls. She gave Thalia no chance to answer as she continued in a voice that was unintentionally low and slightly slurred, affected by the substances that washed their way through her bloodstream "I'm coming with you." She wasn't asking for permission, she was fed up and wanted to know what was actually happening - she would rather be dead than in the dark.

Thalia stuttered indistinctly and nondescriptly, but, with a few sighs, Annabeth's presence was accepted by the group. Though it was a hesitant acceptance accompanied by an unsettled heartbeat that almost hurt and a fluttering stomach.

 _She was too young to know about this, they all were._

But, in the alcove she had followed Hazel into, Annabeth heard nothing. There was no beeping, no screaming, no laughter that could drive even the most composed of men to insanity. There was only a silence that, to all but Annabeth who knew nothing but, left a deep-seated empty feeling and pressing sense of foreboding.

She much preferred the dampness of that alcove, the closeness of the air, the stagnant smell, to the dry, cold, empty-feeling institute that constantly stunk of miscellaneous medical _things_ she couldn't so much as hope to stick a semi-correct name to. Of course, she would be hard pressed to find something she detested more than she did the institute that had stolen her away from the life she had had no qualms in leading, that kept her under lock and key and in the constant view of the all-seeing security cameras.

Which reminded her…

"How do you guys even get here without getting caught?"

"The security guard today is lazy - he never notices." Leo told her offhandedly, voice travelling through the darkness. She was almost sure the knee bouncing in such a way it was constantly hitting her own was his.

"But how did you come to that discovery?"

They lapsed into a silence that pressed closer than the dense air. Eventually, almost entirely inaudible, Hazel voiced her meek response.

"It was _him."_

Annabeth let the silence fall upon them once again. She wasn't ready to ask who _he_ was and she was sure they weren't ready to discuss it. She held her breath for a moment and waited until she could feel the weight of the air, comparable to the weight of the entire world at that moment, lessen on her shoulders.

In that moment, even more so than before, the others longed for that beeping, even that screaming, perhaps even the maniacal cackling that froze each and every one of them, all the way down to the core.

The following morning, Annabeth's head very nearly made the acquaintance of the table. It was stopped by Frank's large hand, gently catching her as her eyes began to flutter and her vision, already somewhat tinted, began to meld into a series of unintelligible shapes.

"Be careful," his voice was lowered to a whisper as not to be overheard, whether by the less kind Oddities, the wardens or the cameras "You know you can't sleep yet."

 _I know,_ she thought groggily _But I'm just so tired._

She yawned and mumbled a string of gibberish that meant nothing to he when she heard it, let alone Frank.

He just sighed, shook his head and leaned her tiny form on his arm.

"We're all tired," he murmured sadly.

"So tired," hazel agreed as she laid her head to rest on his other shoulder.

Annabeth was too exhausted to even be fearful of Hera that day. She couldn't even feel the syringe, not the first, nor the second, not the third nor fourth, not even the fifth, as it pierced her skin and more foreign substances filled her blood. She could feel and hear the blood rushing through her veins, the noise like a wave that echoed continuously inside her head.

But it caught up to her later, as they walked down the hallways to their dormitories.

Her legs began to go numb, the noise of the blood increasing, almost sounding like an incredibly poorly taught percussion section in an orchestra. Then her vision began to darken, the field which she could see narrowing exponentially. She could see red as the world began to tilt, and, suddenly, she was falling.

She heard a few voices she was barely willing to recall as being such, sounding as though they were submerged deeply into water, as footsteps thundered around her like an encroaching army and the faces came back.

She felt as though she were drowning, head deep under water. The images that drifted in and out of her line of vision were worse than ever, and they stayed for longer than ever. Their yellowing teeth looked like fangs on that day, their dull eyes paler than ever, almost seeming to radiate their sickly colour to fill the rest of her sight. Blood flowed from the corners of cracked lips, spilling from the nostrils and not stopping, pouring from the corners of unblinking eyes like waterfalls that spilled over overly prominent cheekbones and dripped down into the abyss below them.

They all lingered, but none quite as long as the ones she was sure she had not seen outside of this nightmare world that made her feel as though she needed to writhe and escape, to yell and scream and cry until she was noticed. But she could move no more than those petrified _petrifying_ faces.

The Thalia that wasn't Thalia was followed by the Jason that wasn't Jason, the Pipe that wasn't Piper, the Frank that wasn't Frank, the Hazel that wasn't Hazel, the Nico that wasn't Nico, the Will that wasn't Will.

Then there was the face of the blonde boy.

It looked slightly older than the rest of them, perhaps a year Thalia's senior, a worrying concept for how much worse it really was.

There was blood matting the sandy blonde hair that was somehow both overgrown and falling out in tangled clumps. His face was marred with violent scarring, beyond the precise medical scars she had seen only a couple of times on tender necks and cheeks. Among the multitude of these, there was a thick red scar that oozed blood of gold and black, extending from his jaw to his eyebrow that covered a face that may have, outside of the horrifying reality created by her subconscious, been handsome. The face stayed there, wide eyes a pale blue that seeped into her very being, flashing to gold for a fraction of a second every now and then. Each time the colour shifted, a shiver tickled at her spine, rolling down her back alongside her sweat as she thrashed and panted in her distress.

But the other face was arguably worse.

It was male as well, but so much younger - presumably barely her age. The hair was so dark it seemed to suck all the light from its fabricated surroundings, wavy but lank and greasy, hanging in tendrils around the face that was the unhealthiest in appearance she had seen thus far. Rather than the usual white, the disturbingly translucent skin was the colour of aged parchment, the veins beneath, the pattern of which could be followed as easily as the solution of a maze on a child's menu could be found, were green. Annabeth felt her own heartbeat speed up as she became more sure that those veins were networking very little blood around that tiny, short, frail body.

The eyes were somewhere between green and blue that shone out of the face that was barely anything aside from them, like a spotlight. The blood that fell from them did more than drip, flowing down at a rate similar to the Niagara Falls, pooling in the hollows where his clavicle was located, uncovered by the shirt he wore, big to the point at which his minute frame fit through the neck hole, the sleeves only acting as such at the bend of the elbows in his skeletal arms.

More blood poured at a similar pace from every orifice, the ears included, occasionally mingled with gory viscera she wished not to even ponder considering, feeling sick enough already as her brain hammered at her skull, her heart refused to move to any reasonable beat and her stomach jumped up and down repeatedly. Those droplets rolled steadily down the strands of his hair, dripping down his front, his back, his sides, travelling all the way down his face, from the centre of his forehead, down and off the end of his nose, back over his lips, dripping from his shin.

She could hear him breathing, something she had not been able to do before. Even though the visage she could see was living, that noise sounded very much like the death rattle.

Then he did what none of the others had.

His face shifted, eyes still not blinking, mouth closing, his jaw clicked like some sort of bad machinery. That mouth stretched outwards into a smile, the blood that pooled at the cracks in those lips mingling with the rest of it.

She knew this couldn't be real, you couldn't bleed that much and continue to live, but she couldn't breathe as she stared back at those eyes that stared decisively right through her.

Then the lips parted again, torn edges linking together like gruesome strips of velcro, and a sound came through the gap. The noise was like a hiss, almost reptilian in sound quality. But she could not hear what it said.

She pushed through the void, feeling her way through it as though it was made of molasses, finally managing to surface from the substance. She emerged from her horrifying immersion, hot tears covering her cheeks. She sat up and gulped down air like water before touching a tentative finger, shaking as though it belonged to a person older than any she had ever met, to the hot form of one of the tears. She prepared herself for the worse.

Thankfully, she hadn't needed to. The hot trails that coated her face were as clear as the Caribbean sea, not at all like crimson she had been both anticipating and dreading.

Her breath hitched as she heard the wheels rolling over the tiled floors.

The wheeling stopped as a weight planted itself in the chair by her head.

"Name?" A stern, monotonous voice asked. She looked up hesitantly, grey eyes meeting purple - she couldn't help but feel as though the man she saw appeared to be much alike to a cherub, though he did not keep any of the cute components.

"Annab-" She began, surprised to hear that her voice was something more than the guttural whisper that had forced its way out of the boy's throat.

"Name?" He repeated again, sterner than ever.

She stared down at her pockmarked arm, despite having no need to any longer, and recited the blackened numbers on her forearm.

He nodded.

"Orange," He said loudly, she nodded her meek response "Fourth wing," She nodded again "Z45QT," Another nod "Terminal quality." That was new.

"What?"

"Terminal quality - it is not of your concern. Leave." He stared at her through gradually darkening eyes. There were images dancing across the irises, like a film in which each individual image was as gruesome as it possibly could be.

She stood from the bed, the sheet-less mattress showing clear signs of where her sweat had seeped into it. The man crinkled his nose as her feet, still numb, shuffled over the floor.

"Come." There was another man just outside of the door, this one was also short and plump, though the pigment of his hair and eyes was far lighter, his features less murderous in nature but by no one's definition were they welcoming.

There was a badge sewn into the shirt he wore, a caduceus. She supposed it fit, he was some sort of medical staff, with surgeons gloves and a stethoscope slung around his neck.

She was led back to her room - they clearly did not trust her to wander the corridors unsupervised (not that she blamed them, escape was much at the top of her wish list). The door was opened before her and locked behind her the second both of her soft-fabric-clad feet crossed the doorway.

She heard that the room was filled with snores of varying tonal qualities, the difference between which was finally decipherable due to the sudden clearness of her mind. Now the only cloud there was that of the memory and mystery of the bright-eyed, bloody, emaciated boy her mind had created.

But she knew that didn't make sense - she had read on countless occasions that the human brain was just not smart enough to fabricate an entirely new human being - hers had warped images of real people but where could the last two possibly have come from?

But when the man left, it stopped abruptly and a series of figures sat up to look at her through kind familiar eyes. But they still felt washed out, as though the barest remnants of her horrors had seeped through the veil between reality and imagination and were making their presence known to her.

"Are you alright?" Piper's kind voice checked with no lack of empathy - maybe she knew the feeling of having the carpet of a normal existence pulled roughly and inconsiderately from beneath your unprepared feet.

Thinking of Piper's heterochromatic eyes swimming with flashes of pastel that sucked her right in, Annabeth swallowed the lump in her throat that had begun to grow and mustered up a response.

"I'm fine."

Nico scoffed "You're not."

"You're right," She relented as she wandered over to her own bed "But I will be." With that, she let her mind slip away into the realms of fiction, for once a pleasant place with no bleeding faces that seemed to have been starved for as long as hey could have been without the arms of death clasping onto the and dragging them away.

Nico sighed the moment he was sure Annabeth was asleep.

"In this Hellhole, the whole concept of fine is make believe. Good luck." His voice trailed off as Will's hand found his and their fingers interlocked together.

"We can reinvent fine," WIll said in an attempt at reassurement.

Fom across the room, Thalia did not hesitate to voice her answer, pessimism disregarded "How do you plan on doing that?"

His mouth stayed shut as his mind froze in such a way he dared not even consider the search for an answer.

He was aware there was none, that his statement had been empty and he had been very openly taken up on the hollow words that seemed to echo around inside the space of his head, like a recurring dream.

Thankfully, Leo was merciful enough to break the ever growing tension of the room.

"WWe''," he shook his curly hair out "I'm gonna die if I have to stay awake for a single second more - night!" He flopped right onto his bunk, thin limbs instantly tying themselves into the mess of blankets.

What most of them didn't know was what he saw. How could they? How could they know that, for however long, his presence of mind had been entirely taken over by _the image._

The bloody image, the emaciated image, the boy with the green eyes and black hair whose face was near impossible to trust to any modicum from the get go. The boy who he had seen smile amongst the sea of unbearably familiar faces that never moved once, just remained frozen, contorted in the same expression of unadulterated agony.

How could they know about _him?_ The way his sandy blonde hair was getting dyed red with his own blood and the way that his old scar looked entirely brand new again? How could they possibly know the daunting images that flashed across his subconscious at each second he allowed his eyes to flicker closed?

Annabeth was less tired the next day in a physical sense, but her mentality was the most exhausted she had ever felt it.

That fragile state of mind only continued to be worn away at as she heard it.

She heard the rasp, the voice that she could hear speaking at a fair distance away but could decipher none of. She heard the rasp grow nearer.


	4. Welcome, Quarantine Kid

Annabeth could feel the room spinning dizzyingly and darkening to imperceivable measures as she saw that face.

It was nightmare, in the most literal sense of the word, that had been pushed from the boundaries of her mind, straight into the reality in front of her she had never wished to escape from more than she did at that second.

The spinning darkness only proved to cement that terrifying image.

She saw the face again, still the same colour - that of old parchment - attached to a barely seen body, with wide eyes and bones that were so sharply visible she was unconvinced they could not be considered weapons. The face was blank tough, no blood or gory viscera spilling from it, only a few cuts here and here that had scabbed over, a latticework of scars decorating the skin in varying shades of white and pink.

But worse still, the face from her nightmares, the one that spoke in the rasping voice, with the eyes that absorbed any and all light, the one that looked to be knocking on death's door with all four of his stick-thin limbs, was staring straight at her.

Or at least it seemed so. He was staring both at her and beyond her; he was staring at the entirety of the orange table of wing four.

He was dragged over to them, hanging limply between a grip stronger than that Annabeth had struggled as much as she possibly could to escape from. The two large men to either side of him looked reluctant to hold their arms any closer to their bodies than they were, as though this boy, perhaps her ge, but shorter and the skinniest living person she had ever seen, could somehow cause them, _them_ being men who had many inches on even Frank and muscles that bulged as though they were trying to escape the constraints of the skin.

How asinine of a fear would that be? How could this boy who had not moved once as the carted him towards the oranges like a rag-doll hanging limply between them, who surely weighed as little as one of the food trays Annabeth despised eating off of, be so scary to men like them?

But, at the same time as she was wondering this, she was paralysed in submission to her fear of those yes and that face, so full of sharp edges it could have been made with a ruler. She was frozen as she looked at the nightmare face that so diligently did not move.

And she was not alone in that fear.

Not one of them at that table could move at all, think with any degree of rationality, or speak with any modicum of eloquence.

Not a single finger twitched on the cold tabletop, not a single eyelid closed over bright eyes, dimmed suddenly, not a single foot tapped a soft, pattering rhythm on the ground. Nothing.

It was as though the lively oranges had been swapped out for corpses without the rest of the room being alerted of the change.

But the room suddenly lurched into motion as the boy was dropped roughly by the officials who had suddenly backed away with yelps more befitting of small dogs than themselves, shaking hands that had suddenly been coated in blisters like a gruesome glove, the sore skin a mixture of mottled, violent red and purple.

Without another word, on quick feet, they left, not helping the boy to his feet and showing him a seat, just letting him sit there on the floor with legs that were surely too weak to lift him.

He looked around with wide eyes before clawing his way up using the wall to his left - and clawing was surely the best word, for his long, jagged nails peeled away flecks of white with little disease.

He rose onto shaking legs, eye wide, not once moving from their chosen place on every eye at the orange table of wing four. Those shaking legs slowly, laboriously, painfully moved him towards them purposefully.

Then he fell onto the last remaining chair, right beside Annabeth who felt herself backing away subconsciously, with a heavy thump.

No one of them could look away from those eyes that each and everyone of them was familiar with, the peculiarity of a child whose chapped lips were slowly parting into a smile, blood seeping through the numerous cracks, dripping down his chin in a way that was just as familiar.

"You," he began in a rasping tone that threw Annabeth's interest from his bright eyes to the dark blood dripping from his mouth and chin, to the narrow neck from which the hoarse sound arose "Don't know," he paused and began to cough, a sound so much alike to the death rattle each of them found themselves backing away a little bit "Hell," he recovered, eyes rising from the floor and scanning each individually "yet."

Annabeth was sure, as she felt herself freeze as the words grated on her ears, all other sound from the room she was sure, somewhere in the back of her mind, was as noisy as ever, blocked out, that he was entirely correct.

She was not alone in that thought.

Jason was the first to recover to some extent.

"What's your name?" he asked, hands uncharacteristically finding themselves knitting together and unravelling restlessly as his eyes moved in a similar manner from the unsettlingly familiar gaunt face of the child to those he was comfortable with his familiarity with.

The boy's eyes found his without hesitation, boring into him and making him wish he had never found the voice to ask.

"I don't remember entirely," the words that rose from split lips were disjointed and clearly painful and difficult for the unpractised vocal chords of the poor boy "I think it was-" His eyes narrowed in thought and Jason found himself able to breathe again, watching the boy with eyes that were somewhat more sympathetic than they were scared "I think it was… Percy," he decided after moment, doubt still pasted on his features that still struck a nerve in all of their minds.

"Percy?" Thalia made herself ask - she didn't think it was fair to alienate this boy who was young and probably rather terrified when all he had done was look astoundingly similar to the face she had seen the face they all seemed to have seen.

He nodded mutely before staying silent and still for a few minutes. After that he spoke again, eyes again spanning over an area they should not have been able to.

"But I think you'd know me better as," he began to cough again, blood spattering from his mouth, staining his skin as he coughed into his boney hand "The Quarantine Kid,"

Annabeth just continued to stare in prolonged silence as the table around her sprung into a state of life so frantic it almost seemed as though it were a last second panic before everything drew to an awful yet suspected end.

"You've been here for how long?" Piper asked after some time, when the world around her began to fade back into comprehensible coherency.

He looked down at his hands, at his bloodstained nails and palms, at the dirt caught between nails that were, much like his bones, a viable choice of weapon.

"Eight," it was the first word to leave his mouth that was not prolonged as he tried to push it past his lips, voice incapable of doing anything else but struggle in an attempt to communicate.

"What was that?" Piper asked again, having missed his hurried response.

A sigh preceded his word "Eight," he said again "Eight years."

"So it's true then?" Frank asked hesitantly, "Al the stories of the Quarantine Kid everyone tells you when you get her but nobody believes?"

"How do you expect me," he gestured to himself "To know these stories?"

Frank flushed red as Thalia asked a question of her own, stopping him from uttering a jumbled mess of embarrassed mumbles that _might_ have been an apology.

"What's your code, then?"

He looked at his wrist as though he hadn't actually, in eight years, memorised the short string of numbers and letters that formed such an integral part of his identity in Elysium.

"A01AA," he read off slowly "What does that mean?"

"It's your oddity, not that we could tell you what that actually means."

"Oddity?" he asked, shocking the entire table at his cluelessness to the life he had been living with for the past eight years.

"You know the things that got us here?"

"The doctors call them mutations," he told them quietly as he traced patterns over his hand with his fingers "They say I'm dangerous."

"What did you do to the guards earlier?" Hazel asked, both curious but somewhat unconvinced she really wanted an answer.

"I made them let go."

"How?"

"I burned them-"

"But AAA isn't fire," Leo cut him off with surprise on his face, masking the fear that would not fade "ABF is…"

"I didn't use fire," Percy's eyes met Leo's and the surprise deteriorated as the fear intensified "It's not too challenging to make their blood boil," everyone shivered as they stared at the boy they were suddenly thinking they had all right to be fearful of "the real challenge is controlling the area you heat up." he looked contemplative but not remorseful "I guess I'm lucky they dropped me- if they hadn't it would have been worse, and if it was worse they never would have let me out. Never."

"Your oddity is control over blood?" frank's startled voice was meek, drowned out by the raucous sounds of the room.

"Water," Percy corrected, disconcerting eyes finally focused intently on something aside from them "And anything with a water content."

"You actually know how to control your oddity?" Will asked, knowing full well most of them, the A's especially, had only the most basic grasp on the fundamentals of reining in their powers.

Percy shook his head "Didn't we already discuss that I could've burned those wardens to death?"

"You could've given me something to work with," Nico mumbled, earning himself a gentle, exasperated slap from Hazel and a shove from Will. He narrowly avoided toppling from his stool.

"But you'd still risk doing it?" Frank asked again, becoming more scared of the tiny twelve-year-old with every word he heard the boy say.

"I've done worse," he shrugged, making Frank wish he'd never asked and deterring all of them from pressing any further into what that was.

They had an appointment with Hera that day.

Her room was the same as ever, aside from the tray that was filled with more needles than usual, each bigger than any Annabeth had seen thus far.

She gulped as Percy, standing awkwardly to her side much to her displeasure as she was still entirely unnerved by him, looked over them, large eyes lazy.

"That's for all of us?" he gestured loosely to the tray with a careless flick of his stick-thin wrist. He sounded unimpressed.

Thalia hummed her response, a soft-sounding noise that couldn't have been anything but a confirmation.

He whistled, the noise sharp and very loud.

"You guys have got it easy!" he exclaimed, causing Hera's eyes to turn to him, lacing the fear of the wardens but seeming a slight bit uncomfortable.

She examined him as though he were an exhibit, trying to understand his extremities and absurdities. Then she stopped, stared at him straight in those face-consuming eyes for as long as she could stand, then she spoke.

"They let you out?" Her voice was colder than Annabeth had ever heard it, like she was schooling it even more carefully than usual, putting too much effort into the empty ringing of it. But her eyes did not focus properly on the target of her words; she could not bear to look for any longer than she already had.

He only hummed, tracing more patterns on hands, exposed by the pushed-back sleeves that would have otherwise hug down far below them, with his nails as he struggled to shrug the jumper he wore back up onto his shoulders.

Annabeth may have lost track of the days entirely, but she was entirely convinced it was summer still - she was bewildered as to why he would be wearing his winter clothing. Or at least she was until she looked at him a bit closer and realised that his body fat was so low that he was probably freezing even in the over-abundance of thick fabric that he was essentially swimming in.

Hera looked at him again, hands placed sternly on her hips.

"You finally started to behave?" Annabeth found herself oddly reminded of the familiar scene of a school teacher scolding a particularly disobedient student. It was a simple image, one she had seen numerous times that had annoyed her each one. It was a simple scene she fruitlessly found herself wishing she could see again.

He grinned, flashing teeth that appeared as though they had been manually sharpened, almost feral in appearance behind that smile that was anything but friendly.

"Hardly," Hera took a minute step backwards "I just learnt to be more discreet with my misbehaviour."

Hera tutted, almost silent in her displeased action, as she stared at the small boy who she knew had seen so much he would never even be remotely intimidated by her as her other 'patients' were.

"Five," She began sternly. Annabeth recoiled at the hearing of such a low number as that "I suggest you learn to respect your elders, lest you wish to be quarantined once again." She was grasping and she knew it; he knew it.

He flopped to the floor, stepping back from the line. Hera sucked in a breath, held in her mouth rather that lungs, locked behind pursed lips. His knees rested beneath his chin, his elbows slung over them carelessly, back pressed flush against the wall. It was cold, even through the thick fabric covering him.

"Fat chance - it's funny that you think you have power in this place. What are you? Second tier? The only ones below you are the assistants and newbies."

She didn't have a response, just a few attempts at words that never came to proper fruition followed by resigned huff of defeat.

Percy looked more than pleased with himself and was not even made to stand back on the line as Hera began. He was the first to go as his number was the lowest and he had, technically, been there the longest, even if he had been held in quarantine for so long.

Quarantine. God, he hated that place - he hated the close walls that had kept him trapped in darkness for most of his life, he hated the doctors and the awful chair they would strap him into, he hated the visits of staff who would ogle him like he was beyond any extension of understanding by the simple human mind. He hated feeling restrained but had never been anything but.

Hera noticed she had a hard time finding a spot of his arm that was more than bone and not already scared with either the tell-tale line of a careful incision or the small spot of an injection site. In the end she just picked a point on his arm at random and injected the first lot of serum. Then the next. Then the next. Then the ones after that.

Annabeth gulped as she watched, the most scared she had been in a long while - they hadn't had that many before, not one of them had - as he sat there, face set like stone into that uncomfortable grin that felt more foreign than pained to his face and more painful to her than it was him.

The flash of pointed canine she saw beneath split lips was tainted a rather unpleasant yellow. She wasn't convinced hers were not the same by this point, she could not recall the last time she had caught even the slightest glimpse of her reflection in a mirror- the most they had at Elysium was the warped, indistinct traces of reflection that could be seen in the dully polished metal that could be found at uneven intervals around the institution.

She was surprised when he returned to his claimed 'seat' on the floor, the furthest from her, that he sent her a glance without the usual oddness found in his eyes.

She kept looking at him, trying to examine the results of the worst Elysium had to offer, becoming more scared of the happenings within the walls each time she dared look. Once again, as she thought about why he had chosen to sit, her mind was drawn back to the image of his shaking legs, nothing more than bone beneath skin of the unhealthiest colour possible, she was left shivering at the thoughts she could procure of Elysium's quarantine. But that was only what she could deduct from looking at Percy -she was sure it was worse than she was able to see.

She hoped to never see it.

She'd never let herself see it.

Annabeth would have thought she was numbed to the pain of the needles by this point, immune to the promised discomfort that came with having a foreign substance race along your bloodstream. She was wrong. She was unprepared for the sensations of the racing, of the stinging. But she kept her face as schooled as Hera's voice - she couldn't be the only one to how weakness.

She had to resign herself to the fact that Elysium was the only place she'd be seeing for years upon years - eight, she noted, looking at Percy once again as she tried not to let her features morph into an expression of her discomfort - if not forever. She would have to become a proper inhabitant of the Elysium Childhood Institute.


	5. Outside Help

Number five couldn't be affected by the nightmares that plagued his sleep relentlessly, night after night, never allowing him even a sense of reprieve. He couldn't find anything truly scary anymore - even the darkest parts of his mind couldn't stir up anything worse than what he had experienced from such a young age, grown up around.

Sure, there were the faces, the sea of them that never ended, all so much older than himself that tainted his sleeping conscience. Those faces never spoke, only wandered with gags in their mouths to _there._ The youngest, he believed was maybe fifteen, tagged with that bright orange and the bold, fresh burn of the number four stamped onto the boy's forehead, a single one of his eyes milky white and marred around the edges with skin of pale pink.

Number five didn't know what happened to him, to any of them, after. He did, however, know that there were exceptions. Every now and then there would be glances sent in his direction from inquisitive eyes that still held some light, that had not gone dim with the usual lifelessness of the children, probably never going to reach adulthood, who wandered past him like zombies. Those same children would remain in control of themselves, walking rather than wandering about mindlessly, led by the officials who never spoke a word to him as they glanced at him in a slight bit of fear.

The fear would only increase the older he became, after he had begun to practice once he realised, after the mishap, what he could do.

But those were not really nightmares; they were memories.

As always, he woke up, their presence fresh in his mind, but held there with a lack of emotion that seemed to take some of the humanity from his waking moments.

But, this time, those moments of waking were different. He was warm, covered with a blanket, resting on a mattress that, no matter how thin, beat the cold bite of the metal at his back he had grown used to. In fact, comparatively, it felt almost luxurious. That was an observation he took with a grain of salt as he watched the steady rise and fall of the chests of those with whom he shared that rom, each still sleeping soundly. How messed up was he to think such conditions were luxurious?

The answer?

However messed up they had made him.

He realised, as he watched the sleeping face of the boy closest to him, that his perception of time was surely different to theirs. He had been running on a different schedule and, with any accurate perceptions of the passing of time torn from them as they were contained in the institute full of only bright, artificial lights that burned unaccustomed eyes, their lives were operating at different times, disjointedly.

You lost your true perception of time when you first arrived, when you woke up with the brand, the band and the attire. After that, you never got it back.

Percy had to force the idea he was merely 'Number Five' from his head as he stared at the resting face; the children here were more accepting than the scientists who had torn his identity from him.

However, though their reception was infinitely kinder, the way they had looked at him, through narrowed eyes and mouths pressed into tight lines, eyebrows knit together, when he sat unsurely on the edge of that bed, the last left, as though they wanted to say something but had no way of saying it politely.

He didn't want to be treated the same way in the 'morning' as he had the previous 'night', so he removed himself from that bed as quickly as he could. His vision swam, mind still clouded from sleep, and found himself a seat on the floor, back against the wall, as he had in Hera's office.

So he sat there, twisting dark fabric between his fingers as he caught his reflection, warped slightly and dim, in the metal door.

It took a moment for him to recognise it.

He wasn't used to the yellowish countenance his skin had adopted, the way it hung over bones he wasn't aware could ever be seen. He wasn't used to the way his eyes consumed his face, too big for its thinness. He wasn't used to the way he looked so aged yet so young.

He couldn't help but think, as he stared at that image through the dark strands of greasy hair that hung in front of his face like a bad veil, he didn't quite appear human.

He sat there for however long, until the others began to stir. Thalia was the first awake, coming into consciousness slowly then starting slightly, bright eyes disappearing behind veiny eyelids, as she saw him sitting there. Then she blinked a couple of times, memories from the previous day rushing into her head as she continued to look over at Percy.

She mumbled a vague good morning as, all at once, people began to wake around them.

Percy was sat next to Annabeth again, the girl who, through inconspicuous examinations of the room, he realised was alone in being anywhere close to his age.

He saw a few people in those same examinations he noticed were close to the end of their time. The only ones he ever saw younger than twenty were both orange and four, he never knew when they would go and, as such, was left in a state of constant apprehension as he looked upon the kids who had not yet disappeared but surely, Thalia especially, had little time left.

It would appear Thalia caught his lazy glances around the room.

"Ah," She caught his attention with audible exhalation "You're wondering why there are only kids?"

She started again as he muttered an absent response of "No," followed by a shrug and a few more words spoken without a hint of though "I know what happens,"

"You do?" Frank asked him, perhaps somewhat too loudly as Malcolm and a few others from the surrounding tables turned to look at Frank, his face slowly burning bright red, with narrowed eyes.

Percy nodded as he ate as much as his stomach could stand, as quickly as he could. It was a strange feeling, what he considered a rather copious amount of food falling down into the pit of his empty stomach. It was perhaps slightly uncomfortable but, as he let the food settle, it became rather satisfying.

He sighed as he swallowed before turning to the still strawberry-coloured Frank and supplied him a response as the much larger boy continued to look at him unblinkingly.

"You don't?" Percy asked, a little perplexed at their cluelessness. There was a collective shake of the heads of all of the orange table of the fourth wing.

"They pass by the quarantine," he told them calmly.

"Where do they go after that?" Thalia asked, hands clasped beneath her chin, a very particular person held at the forefront of her mind as the question passed her chapped lips.

"Through a door. I don't know where it takes them, but they're a bit different from you lot here."

"How so?"

"They look…" he paused for a while, making Thalia question whether the silence was born from a search for an appropriate word - he had received little if any in ways of official schooling, she was surprised at the quality of his English as it was and would not be surprised if it happened to be the case - or if he was questioning his willingness to supply them with the answer he was "less," he broke off there, as though he was finished with his explanation even though it felt incomplete.

"Less what?" Annabeth pressed, staring at him with wide eyes that seemed to shine beneath the ever-present harsh lighting.

He didn't answer for another moment as he continued to think. He really hadn't intended to continue.

"Less what?" She pressed again, voice a few octaves lower and much more pressing. Her patience was fading the longer he tried it with his empty silence. She began drumming her overly long fingernails on the metal tabletop, the ringing sound filling Percy's ears as he kept his mouth closed.

"Human," he said some time later, after each of the trays sitting on the table was void of food, the glasses of stale-seeming water, room temperature and suspiciously metallic in ways of taste, were empty and the eyes of Annabeth, grey and stormy, unrelenting, had not stopped staring at him owlishly.

"What?" She asked, confused by the seemingly meaningless word that he had spoken directly to her.

"Less human," he said again.

Piper turned to him, multicoloured eyes swimming, as Hazel stiffened and slowly tuned, Leo looked at him with no absence of curiosity in his impish face, Frank's cheeks, still slightly red until that point, paled, Thalia looked exceptionally worried, fumbling her hands as though she was unsure what to do with them, Jason's scar shifted as his mouth dropped slightly open, Nico's eyebrows travelled upwards on his head and Will grabbed at his hand.

Percy felt incredibly small when all pairs of eyes present at the table turned to him intensely, scrutinising him in a way he was used to the scientists that poked and prodded at him on a regular basis doing.

"Less human?" Thalia repeated the words he had spoken, speaking slowly and deliberately as her electric blue eyes seemed to burn him.

"Yeah," His throat felt dry, scratchy and sore.

"What does that mean?" She pressed, syllables over-exaggerated

"Their eyes," he waved a hand as his eyes flitted away from her, to the walls and tabled behind her that he could see over her hunched shoulders "They seem empty. The wardens lead them everywhere and they just wander after them, like they can't think for themselves…"

Thalia seemed disheartened "All of them?" her face made it evident she was desperate for the answer to be no.

"No," She got the answer she wished for, but he still did not seem particularly happy to be saying it.

"Really?"

"Yeah. There are a few who still seem defiant. There was this guy recently, I think you knew him, blonde, scar, orange from the fourth wing. He didn't look blank, he was grinning." Percy felt a shiver trace its way up his spine.

Thalia nodded despondently.

They sat in silence until they were corralled from the large hall, into another room that was even larger. In contrast to the rest of the institute, the room was dark and dusty, dimly lit by flickering lights that hung from the ceiling far above them. It was devoid of any furniture.

Annabeth's voice was high and unsettled as she asked Jason "Where are we?"

He shook his head "I don't know." he didn't look happy about it.

She gulped as the light flickered just a little bit brighter.

Then a voice began to boom from across the room.

"Welcome, wing four, to our newest place for experimentation." There were a series of echoing footsteps as a large figure appeared from the deep shadows in front of the furthest wall.

"I," he spoke again, no features discernible beyond the dark shape of the uncomfortably wide smile that he wore "Am Zeus. This great facility is an empire built up by my father that I am to inherit after his inevitable death. Today, in this beginning of a new exercise, we have decided it would be prudent to introduce you to the soldiers who this experimentation will help," of course the experiments that pained them and ruined their lives would be in no way beneficial to them or a cause they cared for. It was common knowledge the fighters of the Olympus empire were unkind to anyone aside from themselves. They were a last resort in the government's line of defence. In that moment it suddenly became evident where those men got their power from.

"We believe we have discovered just how we can use your mutations to improve their abilities, or, at least, to some extent. Unfortunately, we are not yet finished with our research and, as such, cannot yet send you on." not release, not return to their families, but send on.

The licking noise of the heels of his surely expensive shoes as he stepped back towards the wall again was drowned out by the thundering of numerous boots across the floor as the large group of masked soldiers filed in.

"These," the voice of Zeus suddenly filled the space entirely once again "Are the men you have benefited."

"By doing what?" A scratchy voice said to Annabeth's side "Managing to stay alive in this hellhole?"

Thankfully, Zeus did not hear him.

They were then instructed to pair up due to their numbers overwhelming that of the elite soldiers. Annabeth didn't quite register what she was doing as her hand touched bone through thick, itchy material.

Percy turned to her with an eyebrow raised, mouth set in a sort of lopsided manner.

"Hmm?"

"Oh!" she removed her hand from his arm, apologising in a stuttering manner as he waved it off.

"It's not like you did anything wrong," he dismissed as his large eyes examined the grouping of soldiers that watched them with faces they could not see, only eyes that stared at them piercingly from faces that appeared not to exist.

"Hey," he began after moments of piercing silence as the soldiers slowly and uniformly began to disperse themselves amongst the pairings of children who had no control over their powers and, aside from Percy, could likely not hurt the soldiers in any manner "Are you not scared?"

"What? Of what? Of course I'm scared of having to stay here."  
"No," She was intrigued by that single, simple syllable "Of leaving. You know the could get you at any time…"

She had to gulp back the giggle she felt surfacing "But I'm not anything even close to twenty."

"But you're orange from fourth wing."

"What does that have to do with anything?"

He blinked owlishly, speech dying in his throat as he opened and closed his mouth wordlessly.

"What?" she was intrigued now but he was defiant.

"Oh, don't worry,"

"But I am worrying!" She continued to insist "What is it."

"Irrelevant is what it is," there was a cold edge to that gravelly voice of his that marked the end of his willingness to speak. Annabeth, being the exact opposite of an idiot, enough to get her carted for Elysium for her intelligence, didn't miss this and, in spite of her nagging curiosity, she stopped pressing.

Percy sighed. Could she really be so clueless? He knew the others knew about their unfortunate place but they had clearly tried to shelter her from that knowledge. He absolutely couldn't blame them and didn't want to ruin their efforts to shelter her. He wished they'd figured enough out when he got there to do the same.

His eyes found those of the seemingly faceless soldiers yet again. Their numbers were thinning further, men who seemed very aware of exactly what they were doing approaching pairs of children as though they knew exactly who they were heading towards.

Percy noticed with a vague sense of pride that even the soldiers had skirted around him and Annabeth, not looking towards them but shifting their gaits in a manner that would not be visible to most. He grinned up at one soldier who passed by them. He man's eyes that had been trailing over the children he passed shifted upwards, suddenly focusing on the space directly before him. Hazel jumped out of his way as he continued to walk straight onward.

Annabeth began to fidget as she noticed there was only one soldier left but she and Percy were still without one.

She eyed the grin on his face with a sigh "They know about you." she stated, drawing upon a definitive conclusion almost instantaneously.

The one-sided grin stretched further, causing his sunken cheek to dimple slightly. He let out a guttural sound that she supposed could be interpreted as a snicker.

Then the last of the soldiers began on his way over. A final, fleeting glance about the room let Annabeth know, with a vague sense of displeasure, that each and everyone of the soldiers was male.

Meanwhile, Percy continued to eye the slowly approaching soldier in distrust. The approaching soldier looked wildly different from the others, fairly short and scrawny with a strange manner of walking, as though he were limping with both legs.

Percy's keen eyes caught a roll in his otherwise perfect uniform, through which he could see a tiny sliver of his freckled arm.

"Are you sure," He mentioned the second the soldier reached them "That you're one of these soldiers?" Annabeth had to agree with his doubt.

"Number five," The man began "Please tell me your real name." Both children stepped back from the young man.

"Percy," He muttered quietly.

"And you?"

"Annabeth."

"Percy, Annabeth," he addressed seriously "Go to the alcove tonight. You'll find out more, all you need to know for now is that I'm Grover and you are in more danger here than you could imagine!"


	6. Trust?

Thalia was disbelieving when she heard the frankly nonsensical words spew from Percy and Annabeth's mouths.

"He said what?" She asked for what was maybe the fifth time, tone laced with unadulterated disapproval.

"To meet him in the alcove tonight!" Annabeth pressed once again, her wide, grey eyes staring up at Thalia with no intent of relenting present.

"Asinine." Thalia told her, looking into her eyes and noticing, with a slight pang, they were beginning to look like the rest of theirs, like they were too big for the thinning face that surrounded them.

"What?" Percy asked in that cracked voice of his, nothing if not, for lack of a better term, thoroughly pissed off.

"You heard me." Thalia steeled her voice.

"Maybe I did," he responded, manner of speech mimicking hers very intentionally in its coldness "But I didn't' understand what I heard." He breathed slowly before blinking at the same pace.

"The idea of trusting this weird stranger guy, a soldier of Olympus, no less, is nothing but asinine." She clarified, voice slow and mocking. Her dark eyebrows were furrowed, low atop bright eyes.

"Please," Annabeth begged, eyes widening more, voice getting quiet. It was nothing more than a pitiful plea and actually managed to make Thalia feel somewhat bad for her part in the altercation that she had no qualms in participating in previously.

"Look," As if possessed suddenly, Thalia felt her hand move to encircle Annabeth's arm in as comforting of a way as she could manage "I don't think we can trust him. Besides, the guard today isn't that slacker we usually pass without incident, it's old-lady Themis' night and she won't let us pass her by. I know where you're coming from, I want to get out of this place just as much as you do-" Thalia told them, but stopped abruptly when she saw the look Percy wore like a mask. That expression consumed his face. It was chilling, challenging, a wordless statement that made her feel as though, despite the fact that she had been speaking from a place of pure honesty, she were a dirty, cheating liar who had been discovered.

She shivered and swallowed all the other words that wished to leave her mouth in a spiel she dubbed meaningless at that moment.

"Let." The word was harsh, it didn't waver like everything else Percy spoke, cracking dryly "Us." he narrowed his sharp eyes at Thalia, almost wielding them like a weapon "Go." he finished, clenching his fists. Thalia thought she could feel herself warming slightly, just enough to be uncomfortable, but was unsure whether it was just paranoia. She was embarrassed at the prospect of being scared of the kid.

"No."

"Thalia," his voice was softer but his eyes were just as hard. "I have nothing to lose right now, but I'm starving," Thalia wished he wasn't, but she couldn't overlook the razor-sharp bones that his yellowing-skin stretched over "and I think I'm dying." Annabeth gulped but Thalia saw what he meant. The starvation was contributing to that 'I've been sitting in this grave in anticipation for a while' look, but his hands and knees were shaking violently, his breath almost violently loud.

"She'll kill you." Thalia warned, resistance beginning to crack, a hairline fracture spreading across it.

"She'll only speed up the inevitable." he shrugged, so nonchalant it was unbelievable.

Then Frank snapped.

"Stop! Stop! Stop it! You aren't going to die, and you need to stop talking about death like you would going to the shops!"

Percy actually laughed, a sound that was barely such and made him sound like he was choking. "I wish I could go to the shops! It'd mean I was out of this hell hole."

"Right," Frank sighed "Bad example."

"So," Hazel began, wanting to talk about anything but death, ideally some sort of productivity "What are we going to do?"

Before Thalia could say a word, right as she opened her chapped mouth, Percy spoke quickly, as loudly a his voice would allow.

"We put it to a vote!"

"Before we vote," Nico said "Give us a more detailed rundown of what happened."

Percy sighed so Annabeth took over the conversation.

"The soldier that came over wasn't like the rest of them, he was short, walked with a limp and-" She hesitated and Percy sighed again, looking at her as if to say 'really' "and he wasn't scared of Percy. He asked our names - not our numbers, our names - and told us to meet him at the alcove tonight before talking to us about what happens here, making notes on a little scrap of paper as discreetly as he could. He never seemed untrustworthy, never seemed like the rest of them." While she was honest, Annabeth wouldn't lie; she was definitely telling them things she wouldn't have otherwise because of how desperate she was to trust him, to leave with him.

She didn't dare look at them as they talked in hushed mumbles, some voices excited, close to euphoric, other downtrodden, a dark cloud hovering over the conversation.

Hazel hated being that dark cloud, but the topic of conversation made her feel cold. She was lost. Of course she didn't want to be stuck in Elysium for any longer, but she had nowhere to go. She was lost, alone, Nico was lost, alone. She didn't understand Percy's excitement, everyone knew he was no better off than them.

So, instead of sitting there and talking everyone down like the dark loud she was dreading being, she forced herself to ask the question she didn't want to.

"What then?"  
It was like the ground beneath their feet had fallen in an instant, crumbling without warning and bringing them all down,quickly, rapidly, but, most of all, without any modicum of control.

Hazel watched Annabeth's eyes dim, the youthful brightness that had filled them left, taken out in one fell swoop by the words Hazel had meant to be innocent. Hazel could feel the sudden, encompassing dullness that appeared where lights had once shone like a blade plunged deep into her sternum.

Her breath faltered, hitched, and, for once, she could hear it above the rattle from Percy's throat.

But percy's face remained schooled, his bright eyes the same, his set features in place.

H stared at Hazel, eyes boring into hers as she gulped, suddenly sore throat burning "We ask him. They must want us free for a reason."

Thalia looked at Percy then. "You don't trust him?" A single eyebrow travelled up her pale forehead.

"No," Thalia was still a bit surprised by his apparent nonchalance "But we need to get out of here - once we're free we can do so much more than we can in here. If things go wrong - if they aren't who they promise, then we can run; we have more power than they do. If they are who they say, if they want something within reason, we might be able to get something more off of them."  
"And if they don't get us free?"

"I'll take the blame."

"If they don't get us free, there will be a lot more than blame to take."

"Let's hope it doesn't come down to that - I'm leaving even if no one else is." And, like that, his hands were rested on the door, eyes visible like torches in the slowly settling darkness. It was old beneath his fingers, almost biting as he felt the chill begin to creep up his arms.

Annabeth gulped as her eyes erratically flitted from one face to the next, pushing back the frightening, blood-soaked images that surfaced over top as she felt her heart begin to pound on her ribcage as though it were a drum. She blinked them away and swallowed down any of her doubts, replacing the face of the boy she had never met with the scar that leaked gold and the eyes that could not decide whether they were a cold blue or a hardened gold that made her want to shrink back into herself, with an image of her family, her father's goofy, smiling face, her stepmother's sterner one, but still smiling, twin babies cradled in her arms.

Annabeth remembered hating helen, her stepmother. She didn't anymore, she couldn't bring herself to when all she had to do to make her seem like nothing less than a saint was think of Hera for the briefest of moments. She wanted to see them again, even if she knew that wasn't possible, not yet.

"I'm going too." She declared in as bold of a voice as she could manage.

She firmly slammed her hand down besides a startled Percys. The banging noise was louder than she anticipated. She grit her teeth, closed her eyes tightly, breathed in deeply and listened. When she determined there were no hurried footsteps pounding on clean floors, intend on coming to criticise them, to punish all of them for the adrenaline running through _her_ veins like water down a flooded river.

She started when a large hand gently placed itself on top of hers, muffled footsteps making a sort of gentle thud behind her. Her eyes travelled upwards, meeting dark, smiling eyes that accompanied a wide, toothy grin she would recognise anywhere. It was the same grin that made her feel warm in spite of the creeping cold from the harsh surface she had hastily slammed.

One by one, slowly but surely, they joined, until Hazel, Nico and Thalia were the only ones who continued to hesitate, hanging back with hands, twitching, aching to reach forwards but still held by sides stubbornly.

One minute passed.

Then two.

After the third Hazel's eyes moved from the floor to her friends. More specifically to frank. His own hand, the one not over Annabeth's, was twitching minutely, reaching out to her. His smile hadn't faded, but it had gone from wam to pleading.

Hazel's feet moved before her brain could tell them not to.

Nico wasn't about to let her go without him. As she grabbed Frank's other hand, he took hers and looked at Thalia.

Thalia was shaking a little, eyes softer than they were meant to be. Those weren't Thalia's eyes, they were the eyes of a small, lost child, alone in the world that was far too big to accommodate for her. Jason was looking at his sister but he wasn't seeing his sister. He blinked, looking at the young eyes that were beginning to leak tears.

"Thals," he said, meekly, quietly. He could hear everyone breathing in the silence of the room.

And, like that, her mask broke and she stepped, almost leapt, forwards. Her hand and his met and she resigned herself to following their plan, even if she couldn't bring herself to trust the promise that soldier had made.

The alcove was honestly too small for them, so it was a wonder how they managed to clamber inside when there was a young man sitting in their already. He was sweating, curly hair dampened, plastered down onto his pale forehead. He twitched his nose nervously as he watched them pile in, that orange band as unmistakable as the animated eyes of sea-green and stormy grey he had made the arrangement with.

He breathed in as the last child sat down. Then he spoke.

"You're coming?" It sounded like a question when he spoke the words but it wasn't one, not really.

"What's your plan?" Asked a girl with bright blue eyes, as hard and sharp as steel, but framed by red puffiness, as though she had been crying not long before. He took her in in the dim lighting but didn't say a word.

He breathed deeply again, a sort of bleat accompanying his exhalation. It appeared as though, especially when combined with his ever-moving, constantly-fumbling fingers he was suspended in a constant state of nervousness.

"The plan is to get you out-"  
"Obviously," A cynical voice spoke up. He looked at the boy who spoke for a split second, a great contrast between the white of his sun-starved skin and the dark, abyss-like black of his wide eyes and messy hair.

"There's someone waiting on the outside with a truck, his name is Chiron and he is here to help, but we need to get there first. I'm sorry to say, but this is our first major operation, our only plan is to charge onwards until we get caught and then fight our way out of that."

"Why did we not just leave ourselves then?"

"Do you know the passwords for the restricted software of Olympus Industries? I've got all the doors ready to open and Themis was told via Email her shift had been delayed a day for the training of a new employee."

He smiled as the flow of words stopped, a sort of awkward expression that didn't fit his freckle-covered face. His nose twitched again, irritated by a few of the hairs from his wispy goatee that had gone haywire and turned on him.

The group lapsed into silence, the awkward type that smothered with its palpability.

It was broken a moment later by a sharp noise that echoed around the space. Percy clapped his hands together twice, his palms stinging with the power put behind the collision of appendages.

"We're wasting ti-" he broke out coughing, cursing the soft crimson stains on dry, calloused palms he stopped to see.

"We're wasting time just sitting here," he tried again "Can we get going?"

Thalia looked at him, making out the outline of his body through the darkness that shrouded them. He wasn't looking at them, rather at the wall that the soldier had his back pressed against. His eyes, as visible as ever, were absent, staring beyond it as though he were looking into the Hell he had emerged from not too long before.

So they left. In the darkened hallways, they followed the soldier who remained nameless to all but Percy and Annabeth.

They didn't get far.

They were stopped by a group of three figures, silhouetted in the darkness, the central one hunched with narrow shoulders, the two on either side large and imposing.

The one on the left growled as the one on the right yelled in a booming, thunderous voice "Halt!"


End file.
